8 ways to improve the customer experience

There’s a rising trend of digital transformation programs – particularly among leading enterprises looking to bring their technology stack up to par to serve customers proactively. Be it Banking, Insurance, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, automobiles or logistics, digital transformations are ubiquitous. With changing customer expectation and behavior, today’s customer has higher expectations than ever before. They interact across many channels and leave signals everywhere about how they are feeling and what they want across their journey. An organization might be listening to the customer feedback on different channels and touchpoints but a lot of times, these listening programs are disconnected. This results in, incomplete insights from siloed data, increased cost, unhappy customers, and low efficiency.

The same holds true for agents who are serving customers as well. Today, agents and bots are working together to make it easier for customers to self-serve while making agents more efficient and knowledgeable.

Gartner predicts that 89% of businesses are expected to compete mainly on customer experience. As per PWC, 32% of the consumers will walk away from the brand after a single bad experience. So, what does this mean? It implies, as a leader, it is important to listen and act to create better experiences at every interaction or touch point and work towards meeting the dynamic digital demands of your customers and employees alike.

One needs to put the customer experience at heart of the digital initiatives. In my opinion, here are a few ways to achieve it-

1. Measuring Customer Experience

Can you improve something you do not measure? No.

While CSAT, NPS and CES are the performance indicators, it is vital to capture and analyze direct feedback from customers and employees. Leverage in-demand tools like Real-time speech analytics, text analytics, social analytics to analyze large volumes of unstructured data and behavioral data (web sessions), which is important to unlock emergent themes and sentiment.

2. Provide omnichannel CX.

Companies are quickly switching over from multi-channel CX plans to an omnichannel strategy. This trend will continue to stay. It should be done in a cohesive, consistent yet in a scalable way. Unification of data sets with a connected view of every moment across channels in a single platform is required to better manage CX across silos.

3. Empower your employees!

Leverage AI and modern workforce management tools (WFM) to accurately forecast and schedule your employees, while still providing them the flexibility they need to manage their jobs. Work from home trend is embraced by organizations warmly, hence, it is important to automate your planning, forecasting, and optimizing scheduling to match the workloads.

4. EX is beginning of CX.

Improve employee experience and readiness with effective knowledge management tool. It helps agents in fielding unending stream of complex questions every time. Further, empower them with e-learning and coaching.

5. Quality assurance is critical.

Automated quality management will give confidence to employees that they are following the right process and leveraging performance management will aid to capture data across multiple systems to efficiently track, manage, and improve individual and organizational performance.

6. Self-service: win-win for employees and customers

Explore powerful suite of enterprise self-service solutions which connect your customers and employees with the information, resources and support they need—when they need it. Intelligent virtual assistants, voice self-service and customer communities are some of the powerful tools which can be used across  voice and digital channels, to improve experiences, glean business-changing insights and boost bottom line.

7. Data Privacy, preventing fraud and enhanced security.

We have all heard stories of data breaches across all industries, be it healthcare, banking, or retail industry, once enterprise experiences the fraud, it is a complete erosion of the customer trust.

From security and investigative tools, voice biometrics, identity analytics and predictive analytics, to identifying suspicious behaviors, it is important for a business leader to investigate and stop fraudsters in their tracks.

8. Balancing humanity with automation

While bots and human services have locked horns, it is essential for a business leader to know that the winning recipe for excellent customer experience is a mix of conversational AI based VA’s and highly skilled customer service agents. Though automation is important to facilitate customer, in answering routine queries, enabling faster onboarding, covering for offloaded agents but humans are required for improvising in sticky situations.

To sum it up, I would request you to question yourself, “How much time do you spend understanding people (customers and employees), I mean really deep understanding?” The better you know how they feel, the better you can meet their needs! Leading brands rely on Verint Cloud to engage with customers and power more than 3 billion customer interactions per year. The result? Amazing customer experiences.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ET Edge Insights, its management, or its members